BRITISH police hunting for Madeleine McCann were last night examining up to eight “important” leads after meeting private eyes.

We know this, how?

Four detectives visited the Spanish HQ of the Metodo 3 investigation agency, which spent six months working for parents Kate and Gerry. The Brit officers, from a 30-strong Metropolitan Police team carrying out a review of the case, took away around 30 boxes of documents.

Go on:

The agency’s director Francisco Marco told a Spanish TV show [The Ana Rosa Programme]: “I think there are six, seven or eight very important leads in there. They were passed at the time to Portuguese police who ignored them because it was a very politicised issue.

“They didn’t want to look into anything that didn’t come from their own sources because of Portuguese chauvinism. We were never allowed to do a proper job. Scotland Yard can now continue with all the work we did inside and outside of Portugal.”

These are important new leads because the Spanish private detectives – who were very well paid well and failed to present a single piece of evidence as to what happened to the innocent child – say so.

“Agents [of Metodo 3] have distributed photographs of the little girl with an appeal in French and Arabic to call with information about her whereabouts. But it has proved difficult to reach all of the isolated communities where a child could have been taken, many of which are in lawless, mountainous regions”

Those lawless Moroccans, eh. Tsk!

Says Marco in answer to be asked if Our Maddie is alive:

“When we were investigating we were always trying to find a living child. I’m not going to answer your question because I don’t want to offend the parents. Hopefully for the parents she will be found alive.”

Jerry Lawton sums up Metodo 3’s work:

They sent a team to Morocco to chase up leads that she might have been smuggled out of Portugal to north Africa.

Included in the files are investigations into Raymond Hewlett, a convicted British paedophile who was in Portugal when Madeleine went missing and left for Morocco three weeks later.

Hewlett never made a death bed confession, as the Sun hoped. There is no proof whatsoever that any Arab took the girl.

What says the actual police? A Scotland Yard spokesman said:

“We are not prepared to comment at this stage on the work being carried out by the review team but we can confirm some of our officers met with Spanish private detectives on Tuesday.”

Colin Myler, a former editor of the News of the World, also gave evidence and defended his decision to publish extracts from the diary of Kate McCann, the mother of the missing child Madeleine McCann, which she said had left her feeling “mentally raped”. Mr Myler said he had been repeatedly assured by Ian Edmondson, his head of news, that the McCanns had given their blessing to the publication through Clarence Mitchell, their spokesman. Mr Mitchell has said that he was misled and was never told that the paper planned to publish extracts from a diary leaked through the Portuguese police and sold for €20,000 (£17,000).

Myler said he had told Edmondson on the Friday night: “I don’t want Kate coming out of church on Sunday morning and finding out that her diaries have been published without her knowledge.”

Myler told the court he regretted the publication, but had been given assurances by Edmondson that the tabloid was on safe ground. Lord Leveson challenged the clarity of Edmondson’s assurances, calling a transcript of a conversation between him and Myler over the issue, which was read in court, “ambiguous”.

Myler told the inquiry that he would not have published if he had known Kate McCann had not given her consent, and “felt very bad” about the episode.

The former editor was also grilled by inquiry counsel Robery Jay QC about the allegation that he “berated” Gerry McCann over the phone after the McCanns decided to give an interview to Hello magazine rather than the News of the World.

Myler denied the claim, telling the court that he had “no cause at any stage to berate or be irate at Gerry”. He said he “valued” his relationship with Madeleine’s father, and had simply pointed out to him that the News of the World had better circulation than Hello.